Teachable Moments: Patricia Beach is a supporter of her art students

Patricia Beach is the only art teacher at Wolfson. One student says Beach got her back into art by showing how to make her work personal for herself.

Patricia Beach thought college wasn’t an option for her growing up in a single-parent household where money was tight. It wasn’t until high school that one of her teachers got her interested in art class and made her realize she had the ability to get a college degree.

Today, Beach is paying it forward by refusing to let her students be stopped by barriers, especially when it comes to art at Wolfson High School.

“I’m just doing what my teacher did for me,” Beach said. “If more students have someone who supports them, who shows interest in their talents, it can really change a young person’s outlook.”

Beach’s classroom is covered wall to wall with reference books, color wheels, student art projects, as well as her own.

“Welcome to the chaos,” she said.

In the classroom, teenagers stand around large tables, working on their first large project of the school year, designing and creating a color wheel with any medium that they choose.

Beach is the only art teacher at a school with more than 1,000 students. She admits that her job can be challenging, but she always has time to help her students. Because her classes usually consist of students doing different levels of art, she lets them have free range in the classroom and walks from table to table, observing and asking questions.

Angelica Valdes, a junior taking Advanced Placement art, credits Beach in getting her back into art because she showed Valdes how to make it personal for herself.

“My dream is to live and create art in Paris, and with Mrs. Beach’s help, it could be my reality one day,” Valdes explained. “I stopped caring about art for a while, but Mrs. Beach got me interested again. My work has improved a lot since I first took her [class] in ninth grade.”

Another student, Tiana Reyes, a sophomore in Beach’s class for the first time, said she enjoys art now.

“I can’t draw to save my life, but Mrs. Beach makes it seem so easy. She shows you really simple techniques that make it seem like I know what I’m doing,” Reyes said.

The general consensus among her students is that Beach goes above and beyond for them.

“She’ll go to bat for us. She gets us supplies with her own money. I can’t think of another teacher I’ve had that has done the same,” Reyes said.

Beach has also has her students research the work she assigns them, so they can get a better understanding of why what they’re working on is more than just some pencil markings on paper.

With a limited budget for supplies, Beach always finds a way to get her students what they need to succeed in her class.

“I’ll write to authors explaining how I’m going to use their book in my class to teach the students a specific type of basket weave or about a specific time period for art, and often they’ll send me signed copies of their book that I leave in the room for the students as reference material,” she said.

At the end of the day, Beach wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

“If I can make a difference for just one student, I’m doing my job.”

Teachable Moments, a project of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund, highlights the region’s most innovative and effective teachers. Stories that appear each Monday in the Times-Union’s Metro section are written by journalism students at the University of North Florida. For more information, visit Jacksonville.com/teachablemoments and www.jaxpef.org.